The Cuban Triangle

Monday, July 20, 2015

The
critics do have a point. Cuba got something today: recognition that the
socialist government in office in Havana since 1959 is in fact the governing
authority in Cuba.

One
wonders how Fidel Castro feels about it.

He
reacted
to the December 17, 2014 announcements with the grumpiness to which his age entitles
him, saying he is not against peaceful solutions even though he does not trust
the United States. Nonetheless, he huffed, “The President of Cuba has taken the
pertinent steps according to the prerogatives and powers granted him by the
National Assembly and the Communist Party of Cuba.”

I
also wonder if he thinks back to his April
1961 speech, when he couldn’t envision that “the
imperialists” could ever change their spots:

“Because what the
imperialists cannot forgive us is that we are here, what they cannot forgive us
is the dignity, the integrity, the bravery, the ideological strength, the
spirit of sacrifice and the revolutionary spirit of the Cuban people. That is
what they cannot forgive us, that we are right under their nose and we made a
socialist revolution right under the nose of the United States!”

I
don’t know about forgiveness, but there they are, still right under our nose,
and they have been recognized. So there.

But
did we lose anything?

For
those who think that the past policies were successful or productive, or the
only morally correct posture toward our socialist neighbor, we have lost a
great deal. Pass the smelling salts, please.

For
the rest of us, it’s a rational path, it has nothing to do with approval, and
it’s no more radical than Nixon’s relations with China or Reagan’s with the
Soviet Union.

And
let’s be clear that for decades, our policies have been tantamount to formal
recognition anyway.

We
have had a diplomatic mission in Havana since 1977, housed in our old embassy
building. We, the imperialists, have more diplomats accredited there than any
other country. We negotiated agreements on migration and other matters. We have
collaborated on drug enforcement, search and rescue, transfers of prisoners,
and other matters, with our diplomats dealing directly with each other.

This
relationship carried on even during the George W. Bush Administration, and has
long amounted to de facto recognition
of the Cuban government.

Today
it changes to full legal recognition. What matters more than that legal
formality is the opportunity before us, and what both nations make of it.

Wednesday, July 15, 2015

Next Monday, the
Cuban Embassy will open in Washington, to be followed later this summer by the Stars
and Stripes going up at the U.S. Embassy in Havana.

Two remarkable events,
and both will soon seem ordinary.

After all, we have
nearly 300 embassies and consulates around the world, including in many
countries with problematic human rights records or a lack of representative
democracy.

Or to take two
examples, records of territorial aggression.

The Communist
Chinese are literally building islands in the Pacific to extend their
territorial and maritime reach – an innovation, to say the least, in
geopolitics and international law. The Russians, with Soviet “salami tactics”
still in their genes, used plainclothes special forces to take a piece of a
sovereign neighbor’s territory (the entire Crimean peninsula) for themselves,
and have been contesting big chunks of eastern Ukraine ever since.

No one, not even
those feeling faint at the thought of full diplomatic relations with Cuba, has
suggested that we break relations with China or Russia, much less that our embassies
in those places connote approval of those governments or their conduct.

Of course they
don’t, because diplomatic recognition has nothing to do with approving of a
foreign government, or even liking it. It is a means of communicating, nothing
more – to represent our interests, deliver information, ask questions, express
disagreement, seek cooperation, address disputes.

That is why Senator
McCain happily welcomed the head of that country’s Communist Party to his office last week,
“proud of our nations’ vital partnership.” It’s why Senator Rubio celebrates
trade with China, telling CNN last year, “We welcome a China that’s richer and more prosperous,
because that’s a potential trading partner, customers for our products and
services.”

These and others who
criticize President Obama on Cuba are big supporters of engagement everywhere
else. They can only sell their moralistic line on Cuba by basing it on
standards that they themselves apply nowhere else, hoping that no one bothers
to notice and compare.

Or they try to sell
a strategic argument based on the 50-year delusion that the Cuban government is
on the verge of collapse and hence any change in U.S. policy gives it a new
lease on life. (Recent examples here and here, and a useful retrospective here.) This amounts to strategic malpractice, overestimating the impact of
Cuba’s economic difficulties and ignoring nearly everything else about the
country’s politics. But it creates a nice pretext for economic sanctions in
perpetuity.

Thankfully, President
Obama doesn’t buy any of that. He is ending policies that have arguably
strengthened the Cuban government politically and weakened its domestic
opposition, and that in fact have limited American influence in Cuba by
limiting contact by our government and our people.

Instead, he’s
putting Cuba in the mainstream of our foreign policy. We will communicate
through a regular embassy and begin to seek areas of mutually beneficial
cooperation. Cabinet ministers will travel back and forth. If commercial
interests line up, U.S. exports will expand far beyond agricultural products –
and with some movement on the Cuban side, U.S. exporters can help to build a
supply chain for the increasingly large and diverse private sector that is
essential to Cuba’s economic reform. American travelers will continue to grow
in number, and links between our societies will grow in sports, culture,
science, education, health, and other fields. U.S. airlines will set up normal,
cheaper flights that travelers will book on-line. Cuban Americans will continue
to travel in droves, many investing in small businesses in Cuba. Hopefully,
other Americans will follow their example.

The new approach is
a radical departure from 50 years of Cuba policy, but it will appear normal to
Americans because it is the normal American approach to diplomacy.

It will continue to
gain support among Cuban Americans, as it did recently from former Secretary of
Commerce Carlos Gutierrez, the last chairman of the Bush
Administration’s grandiose Cuba transition commission, because it looks to the
future and to the needs of Cubans living in Cuba now.

Congressional action
could make the changes deeper and permanent.

But even absent such
action, our two nations have an 18-month opportunity before us. That’s the real
novelty – not the diplomatic formality, but the prospect of building
constructive ties between our societies after five decades of estrangement.

If both seize that
opportunity, as the saying goes, with la
lucidez que el momento exige, both will benefit and it will be hard for any
future U.S. President to return to 1961.

Senator
Patrick Leahy, the Senate’s President pro tempore, met twice with Raul Castro
in Cuba and pushed the Administration both to resolve the prisoner issues and
to fix our policy. His veteran Appropriations Committee advisor, Tim Rieser, held
everyone’s feet to the fire and stayed close to Alan Gross, especially after
Gross decided to stop receiving visits from U.S. diplomats. Their efforts are
profiled in the New
York Times and Politico.
In November 2013, after the secret U.S.-Cuba talks had begun, Senator Leahy was
joined by 65 other Senators in this
letter to the President, urging him to take “whatever steps are in the
national interest” to achieve Mr. Gross’ release.

Pope
Francis pushed both sides to negotiate; Huffington
Post reports on this Argentine’s history with Cuba.

In
an incoherent
editorial, the Wall Street Journal reiterates its 20-year-old position that
the U.S. embargo should be lifted unilaterally but attacks President Obama for
doing far less. It welcomes the release of Alan Gross and the U.S. spy, but
says that the United States should never “dignify Castro’s regime by sitting
down at a negotiating table,” as if such a result could have been obtained in
any other way. The paper’s editors themselves received Fidel Castro for a nice,
dignified lunch at their own conference table in 1995. I guess that was
different, or the late editor Bob Bartley was a commie. The lunch is shown
briefly in this
video.

Don’t
tell Senator Rubio – 81 percent of Americans agree with his view of Fidel
Castro, but 63 percent support full diplomatic relations with Cuba and 55
percent want the embargo ended in a new CNN poll.